Intel pushes four socket Xeon to China

Intel wants to win back China with its new four socket Xeon chip. China has been doing well on the supercomputer stakes having made the Sunway BlueLight MPP which uses ShenWei SW-3 microprocessors that are made in China.

Now it looks like Intel is hoping that its new Xeon chip that could provide Chinese companies with an incentive to go back to Chipzilla and forget about their homemade chip. Intel's new chip, called the E5-4600, fuses four Xeon chips and 32 processor cores into one package that is more efficient. Yesterday it announced that it will introduce 28 new Xeon chips, designed to appeal to the big spenders and small businesses. But it is the four-socket E5-4600 that is being targeted at China which has a thirst for four-socket chips.

Sales of four-socket servers in China grew 20 percent annually between 2006 and 2010, jumping from 36,000 to 74,000. Due to the global recession, worldwide four-socket system shipments dropped between 2006 and 2010. Chinese companies want more expensive systems simply because they’ve been growing so fast and they can't keep up with uncertainty in the kinds of demand.

Telecos are buying four-socket systems to run their back-end office applications, but they’re also popular with websites, financial companies and the government, Intel said.